Topsoil

Sustainable agriculture - I struggle with calling what we will be doing agriculture or even farming, it's just gardening really. So let me start again: to be sustainable, gardening should not require major inputs to be brought in each season. By inputs, I mean fertilizer, mulch, topsoil. herbicides, pesticides, etc. The goal is for the land to be healthy enough to take care of itself.

All over our planet, topsoil is being depleted (used up, washed away, blown away, buried under asphalt) far faster than it is being created. I'll find the horrifying statistics for a future post, but believe me, we need to care about this. You know we depend on topsoil for our food, right? It doesn't work that well for me to buy topsoil from the store, because that topsoil was taken away from somewhere else. Instead, we need to MAKE topsoil, using our own fallen leaves, cow poop, branch trimmings, rotten tomatoes, apple cores, etc. For Hardrock Ranch, that is the goal, but it's not going to happen right away.

So, we got some inputs coming. Boy, did we. 110 bales of hay arrived on site last night, and we have 15 yards of compost and 15 yards of topsoil coming sometime within the next week. We're going to add that to our hugelkultur piles, or just pile it on top of the ground in some areas, and hopefully start to make some really good dirt. Also, we ran into our neighbors this morning, and they said they would just love to give us some "compost" created by their resident horse and donkey. Now we're talking.

Photos below of the hugelkultur area partially covered with hay (still more to do), and an area heading south from the house, where we want to get a deer-resistant hedge started ASAP. Hey, Ruth Stout says 12 inches of hay will kill the grass and the weeds and turn into beautiful dirt by spring. Hey hay.